The Forcing Function: What a Year of the EAA Really Shows

One year ago, the European Accessibility Act(opens in a new tab) (EAA) went into effect. The expectation was progress. 

A year in, our 2026 Digital Accessibility Index report tells a different story. We scanned 166,000+ pages across 6,100 domains spanning seven industries and two continents. EU sites averaged 25% more accessibility issues per page than U.S. sites, a gap that held across nearly every industry we measured. 

That gap isn’t a verdict on EU organizations. It’s what every market looks like right before a forcing function arrives, and the EU has watched this exact pattern play out once already.

A Year In, the Gap Got Wider

The 25% gap showed up across every industry we measured, with one exception: tech.

Bar chart showing average issue differences between EU and US sites across five sectors.

EU tech companies are right alongside their U.S. counterparts. Not because they care more about accessibility, but because their buyers made it a condition of the sale. In B2B tech, accessibility shows up in procurement reviews and vendor requirements. You don’t win the contract without it. That pressure is the forcing function, and it arrived early for tech. The gap closed. 

Every other industry is still waiting for its forcing function. The 25% gap isn't evidence that EU organizations are further behind than anyone else. It's what any market looks like before the pressure to comply becomes real. And the EU has more visibility into what comes next than any market in history, because it has already lived through the same sequence once.

The EU Has Seen this Movie Before

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) followed the same pattern. A compliance deadline. Widespread unpreparedness. An enforcement curve that started quietly and then compounded fast.

The first two years were quiet. Most organizations took the quiet as confirmation that the urgency had been overstated. It hadn't.

Timeline of GDPR and EAA enforcement from 2018 to 2025, highlighting major fines and regulatory actions across Europe.

The fines tell the story. Roughly €50M in year one. €746M by year three. €1.2B by year five. GDPR went from "probably fine to wait" to the largest privacy fines in history in less time than most organizations run a compliance program.

But the acceleration isn't the lesson. The risk was building through the quiet years. The fines were just the moment the risk became visible. The organizations that read the early signals correctly didn't wait for a landmark fine to tell them GDPR was serious. They built ahead of the curve and turned compliance into an advantage. Privacy-first design became a differentiator. Trust became an asset. They spent less, kept more customer trust, and never had to rebuild under pressure.

The wait-and-see organizations did the work twice. First, the rushed fix, then the fine, then the trust they had to earn back.

The EAA is at that same early, deceptively quiet stage.

The Curve is Already Bending

EAA enforcement hasn't produced a single headline fine yet. That is not the same as nothing happening.

What's happening instead is messier and more telling. Enforcement is starting in pieces, across different countries, through different mechanisms, on different timelines. Exactly the way GDPR started.

• France. Disability rights organizations have filed cases against four major retailers. French law allows fines of €7,500 per infraction and €15,000 for repeat offenses.

• Germany. Warning letters began in August 2025, six weeks after the BFSG took effect. Fines from market surveillance authorities, up to €100,000 per violation, began earlier this year.

• Norway. A healthcare company faces daily fines of NOK 50,000 until its accessibility violations are resolved. The fines began in December 2025 after an inspection found 119 errors.

• Italy. A single unified enforcement process is now in place, a public complaint platform has gone live, and the agency has declared 2026 the year of enforcement. Penalties reach up to 5% of turnover.

The curve has already started. And unlike GDPR's early years, the cost isn't waiting for the curve to steepen.

The Cost Doesn’t Wait for the Fine

GDPR taught the EU a lesson that goes beyond the fines. The cost of unpreparedness doesn't start when enforcement arrives. It starts the moment a gap exists. The fine was the visible cost. The trust erosion was the real one.

The same dynamic is running in EU accessibility right now. Every inaccessible page is a worse experience for someone with a disability, and that cost doesn't wait for a regulator, a warning letter, or a headline fine. Users who hit an accessibility barrier don't convert. They don't return. And they tell the people who trust them to shop elsewhere. 

That spending is not small. People with disabilities control over $2.6 trillion in disposable income across North America and Europe. Most EU organizations aren't set up to capture it. That market is already spending elsewhere.

The Organizations that Move Early Win Twice

The forcing function will eventually close the accessibility gap. But the revenue, the loyalty, and the trust lost in the meantime don't come back when compliance arrives. The organizations that built ahead of the GDPR curve did more than avoid the fine. They captured the trust their competitors couldn't buy back.

Getting ahead of the curve means matching your approach to what your site actually requires. For most organizations, that means automation to handle scale and expert human testing for the issues that require judgment. Automation keeps pace with the volume and rate of change on a modern site. Human experts verify the accessibility issues that automated checks alone can't confirm. Getting that combination right ahead of the regulatory curve reduces legal exposure. It also positions you to earn from the $2.6 trillion held by people who limit their spending to sites they know work for them.

The EAA curve is bending the same way the GDPR curve did. The organizations that recognize this moment have experienced it before.